The phrase "unintended consequences" is going to get tossed around a lot over the next couple of days as a pair of techniques born of a three decades pissing-down-the-leg panic over crime get careful scrutiny. First, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he would seek to lift the deadweight of mandatory minimum sentences from several categories of non-violent drug offenses. Then, a federal judge declared New York City's "stop and frisk" policy a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment. In both cases, we've heard analysts talk about these kind of policies as having had "unintended consequences," most of them racially discriminatory. I find this insultingly ahistorical.

You will hear, often, of the explosion in the United States prison populations "since 1980." That date is not accidental. We elected a president that year who ran on an implicitly — and, occasionally explicitly — racist appeal to white voters by which he argued sub rosa that those white voters should be frightened of black criminals, and angry at black people who were "exploiting" the welfare system. This was the final triumph of the political calculation made when Harry Dent drew up the Southern Strategy for the Republicans when the Democratic party became identified with the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960's. It succeeded so well that it kicked off a decade of racial reaction. The accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement began to be rolled back. (The Justice Department went to court to defend tax exemptions for segregated "Christian academies.") This, of course, continues to this moment, with the assault on the Voting Rights Act.

The entire fundmental basis for what became known as "cultural conservatism" was a fear of black crime and an anger at welfare "fraud." It was an decade of archetypes. Welfare queens. Crack babies. Superpredators. And the national media went along for the ride, because the archetypes were scary enough — "IN YOUR TOWN!" — to move the ratings needle. That very few of them panned out didn't matter. They served everyone's short-term goals well enough to become established as fact. Then, in the middle of it all, the "war" on drugs got itself declared, and the face of the war on drugs was a black or brown face, and scared legislatures passed appallingly draconian laws in response. And a lot of black and brown people — an inordinate number, given the population as a whole — got tossed into prisons that are now so overcrowded that most of them are timebombs. So we're looking at some of those laws again. This is a good thing. But if we really want to do it right, we should look honestly at the history of those laws and decide which consequences were truly unintentional.